This set of bonkers statistics has been created as part of Iain Duncan Smith’s attempt to prove that lone parents, step and non-traditional families are one of the causes of poverty and unhappiness. In an embarrassment for the Secretary of State, the numbers actually show that many traditional families are utterly miserable.

IDS ignored this part of the report in a gushing press release last week when he claimed that “A quarter of a million more children were living with both their birth parents in 2012 compared with 2011”.

This represents a rise of 2%, although little can be drawn from the conclusions of the survey which took place before most of the DWP’s welfare reforms had been implemented. This hasn’t stopped IDS taking the credit, despite the authors of the report warning that: “Caution is advised in drawing conclusions on trends in the data based on differences between the two years reported on”.

Taking the figures at face value however, one trend does appear to be emerging. The number of children under 1 year old living with both birth parents has fallen by 6%. Many of the recent changes to social security, in particular the Benefit Cap, may make staying together a financial impossibility for parents in the lowest income households. Whilst Iain Duncan Smith is squandering millions producing daft surveys in an effort to confirm his personal prejudices, his policies are almost certain to force some families apart.

97 responses to “A Quarter of Children Living With Both Birth Parents In Unhappy Homes Says Government”

A further 49% had considered eating one of their children in a desperate attempt to make ends meet, whilst 99% admitted they wished they’d never been born and a whopping 100% of all poor people shockingly blamed their poverty on lack of money.

My thoughts precisely! The devastation forced on people during this government in terms of it’s ‘welfare’ policies is one that will last generationally, if, indeed, many more people can or do go on to have children. I tend to think it is being made impossible deliberately.

Trying to live on sod all, with children is going to make an already stressful situation worse, add problems with secure accommodation and work – you have a disaster off the bat! Don’t tell me they do not know why so many people are miserable and ill?

When surveyed, 99% (N=100) of ursine respondents stated that they prefer defecation in wooded areas, as trees provide privacy and as tree bark is a good wiping medium. 1% said he would like to explore alternative toileting solutions, such as IDS’ face.

I wonder if any of the miserable parents who stay together “for the sake of the children” have realised how much those children will resent them for a) the misery and atmosphere of hatred and anger that they are being brought up in, and b) for basically putting the blame on the children for their own miserable married life. Once those children are adults, they will either continue the same cycle, because that’s the only example of relationships that they have, and destroy their own children’s lives; or forever resent their parents and recognise the resentment that those parents feel for them in return. I eventually told my parents (after the umpteenth “why didn’t you continue with your divorce when I was a toddler?” from me being met with “we decided to stay together for your sake.”) to stop blaming me for their crap marriage – oh, they are still in the same house, seperate rooms, and coming up to their 50th wedding anniversary next month. Still in a house full of hatred, fear and yelling (despite their ages).

I wonder how many children of single parents are happy, if yes,would they know that life could be more unhappy if they were in a two parent family that are at each others throats. Statistics prove absolutely nothing, the only people that are oversurveyed are the poorest in society and the real problem for most of their unhappiness (i.e. poverty) is never addressed by giving them a proper income.
instead the powers that be provide middle class jobs and salaries to match for social workers, statisticians, social planners or financial advisers to the poor – an absolute joke.

Just watched Sunday politics for our area and a failed businessman is taking government handouts to provide training for young people who say they are happy to work for nothing to get the 8weeks to 6months training in a warehouse producing products which the boss Bill Marley (or should that be scrooges mate jacob) has contracted orders for.

Surely this crook is breaking the law by not paying the minimum wage for the workers who are producing goods for sale.
The so called trainees were probably under the threat of benefit sanction if they did not take these placements, or the young are just not aware of where they stand legally on employment law.

Unfortunately media nonsense like benefits street have only added to the hatred of all people who are unable to work, because the sheeple consider that this is the norm. The hatred and bile that started at the commencement of the programme before anything had been said shows how out of touch the majority of the nation are with the actual rarities, so they go along with it, thinking they are right to do so.

g fawkes
i think poverty could be eradicated tomorrow, don’t you? there is simply no need to wait, to scrap sanctions, conditionality on benefits, the WCA, cap, drastically reduce rents and implement the 40% increase benefits as recommended in the ESC report and build millions of homes…i’m personally tired of promised land politics, just do it, it can be done, tomorrow…

Sorry obd for not replying, I have been over on the dark side fighting with you know who,.
All of what you mentioned above could be done tomorrow but there is not the political will nor enough persuasion from the public to do so.

g fawkes
i picture a cold, hungry, thirsty person, asking for food water and shelter…whilst a politician endlessly drones on, spieling on about this graph, the other reasons, that reason, about how they would like to help but 1st we must rid the world of corruption, actually they are devising plans about how to profit from the others misery…and they are intentionally blind to the corruption in front of there own eyes..that a human being can be cold thirsty and hungry, is not freely given or able to take, their human rights to shelter, warmth, food and water, is corrupt…there always seems to be something else to be done, before the right thing is done…

“A quarter of a million more children were living with both their birth parents in 2012 compared with 2011″.

So fucking what? Not every child can live with both parents. An homeless friend of mine has four children to three different women, separated by hundreds of miles. My nephew has five children to three different women, some of whom have other children to other men; ten children in all, plus one wife, two ex-wives, and three ex-husbands. Should we all live together in one big house, Iain? Or would you Cap our Benefits?

LOL 😀 I know, his mum’s had enough of him, but I’m just pointing out that people can ead complicated lives, and that love like life itself is way too complex to conform to Idiot Dumbo Smith’s ASSumptive statistics.

I don’t know about his mother, but his father was born in 1914, so it’s highly unlikely. His father will be rotating in his grave, wishing he never sired any children. Being father to a complete failure such as IDS isn’t a source of happiness.

He should be allowed to continue doing so, but, away from the world, in a soft and secure room under regular observation.

He must be getting close to a major meltdown or death, surely no human can survive every single cell in their body being so riven with hatred and malignant intent?

IDS clearly doesn’t give a flying fuck about children living in poverty as evidenced by all of his welfare reforms and more recently by his attempt to fiddle with the definition of poverty to try and hide that so many children are actually living in poverty.

Hopefully he’s entering into the end stage of his madness and will be gone from us very soon.

Someone needs to tell him that if he hadn’t married someone with a rich father he most likely would be living on a council estate, depending on government benefits for food. He was, is and will forever be a useless waste of air.

I think what IDS may be doing is using the old psycological trick of power of suggestion… Sneaky!!

It seems these people use all the tricks in the book to mess with the human MIND. Well they have been doing it for CENTURYS.
They probably used interrogative questions, and also used the question to FORM the answer.
Don’t give them any information”. Why would you! These questions are carefully designed to shift the response so they can then be interpreted and construed in any way that they like, they are guiding peoples thoughts away from the real culprits of the unhappiness in familys. Themselves!!

There are so many people in Government who haven’t the slightist idea of family life or how they work. They will prove anything they want to prove by setting up their own ‘group’ and stating this is what they found and treating this as truth they don’t go into the facts they just state anything as someone is being paid big bucks to agree with the so called findings they found!
This is one big money spending for the ‘boys’!
The problem is that many people will believe that staying together for the sake of the children is right …. This just causes more misery for the family, the costs to the children just isn’t worth it, it takes years to understand why they stayed together…. Because some pompus twit wanted at any cost to prove he was right …Even through he was wrong!
I bet his children were sent away to school and were only seen at holiday time!

Whatever Iain Duncan Smith BELIEVES to be true IS true as far as he is concerned. If only he BELIEVED that he could walk on water and tied doing so alone, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I would BELIEVE that there was a God!

Iain Deluded Smith should be ex-communicated from the Catholic Church for his endless bungled attempts at Mass Social Engineering on behalf of his Protestant (no doubt Masonic) puppet-masters, who are responsible for ensuring the P.W.E. is ruthlessly enforced.

lp – the Protestant Work Ethic is just a phrase which was coined in the early twentieth century by a sociologist who was observing Protestantism and other religions and their relation to the secular world and has nothing to do with Protestantism itself, which emerged from Martin Luther PROTESTING at the practices and beliefs of the Catholic Church. Nick Clegg is an atheist, Edwina Currie is Jewish and Camoron is Church of England. Imbecilic Demonic Scumbag would be the way he is regardless of whether he was a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew or a Seventh Day Adventist. He is his own monster, and no-one is pulling his strings. Church leaders from various denominations including Methodists have protested as a group at the Governments abuse of the unemployed, the sick and the disabled, and the Governments reply to them all has been that they (the church leaders) don’t know what they’re talking about.

So you are maintaining that the slave labour, imprisonment, emotional, sexual and physical abuse of young girls in the Magdalene Laundries (Catholic) and the use of child slave labour by exporting children from orphanages (many of whom were not actually orphans ie their parents tried to get them from the orphanage and found they had vanished “been adopted”) to Australia to help build Catholic buildings and work for middle class Australian families(which also involved the above abuse) didn’t happen? And if you want to find out what Protestantism is about, why don’t you try asking Protestants, and not believing every unverified article from every unverified source.

Check out websites on the theme of ‘IDS is a cunt’; I found loads. Picture above: ‘And this is how big my head ought to be by now’.
‘This is the size of the living space to be allocated to each surplus population unit, formerly known as ‘the poor’. It worked fine on the Middle Passage! Surplus of the surplus, we simply threw overboard, and later went back to Africa to buy some more units!’
‘This is the size of my big dinners.’
‘Triangular Trade: a good name for workfare.’
‘Nobody with a television larger than this will be allowed benefits. What do you mean, they don’t make them that small any more? What is a light bulb? Why don’t poor people stop screwing in it? Nurse, where’s my lunch?’

billy
the fools still plan to keep this UJM site, farce going for 2 more yrs though…perhaps they’ll scale down the requirement to use it in the mean time….what misery it has caused people in the meantime…can’t restore the damage it has done to people’s lives…

Every bloody one know the site is useless, so why wait? Terminate and sue for breach of contract. Such a thing would be admitting they didn’t get it right and admitting Dunk’d in Shit is a bloody fool, of course.

Well when the government signs contracts it is done by pompous oac civil servants with no knowledge of contract law and the companies fool them every time that if they try to get out of the contract it will cost three times as much as continuing with it no matter how incompetent, or you could say how ATOS, they are.

I read the news article over proposals to scrap Universal Fake match and that the DWP regularly monitors the site. The truth is, they do NOT monitor that shitematch as on last Friday I counted dozens of fraudulent scam postings, all leading nowhere except to a fraudulent recruitment site x-jobs.com.

Ha ha fucking ha, the lame chimps in government have finally woken up and realised what a monumental cock-up they have embarked upon by scrapping a previously decent gov website and replaced it with a scammer’s paradise.

Maybe now they will also scrap all WPP contracts and put money into creating jobs for us. Fuck the zero-hour contracts. It will only make people worse off than their current situation.

The government has drawn up plans to scrap its official jobs website, Universal Jobmatch, after recognising it is too expensive and that its purpose is undermined by fake and repeat job entries, according to leaked internal communications from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).

A cache of documents seen by the Guardian details how the government’s main website for job hunters – which tens of thousands of unemployed people have been required by the DWP to sign up to – is likely to be jettisoned when the contract for the service comes up for renewal in two years.

Why wait two years for thinking of scrapping UJM? Get rid of the fucking scam site now. If labour come in, next May, what’s to say they themselves will not scrap the UJM contracts and instead keep it going until 2020?

Tory tossers coming up with yet another failed vote policy by saying ‘only if you vote us back in next year, we could scrap UJM in 2016/2017’

ive noticed that suddenly people who work are being promoted to “middle class” status the clever torie fuckers are using the media to drive this home,so we have a situation where if your partner works 16 hr in spar and you get tax credits which is a benefit,but most of them are too thick to realise that,then you can look down on the unemployed sick disabled and those on workfare,after all the government says “im middle class” WHAT A FUCKING DELIBERATE ATTEMPT TO DEVIDE AND CONQUER im not a star on here but ide like to know what people think?

@totallygivenup – those who get tax credits will get a rude awakening when they are forced to look for more hours or a job with more pay when(and if) Universal Credit ever happens. They will then realise they are not quite middle class enough for the government.

The so called tax cut for the low earners ended up with them receiving nothing as any benefits like housing/council tax benefit or tax credits would have been reduced once the higher tax threshold kicked in, putting more in their pay packet, and because the tax cut was paid to all on the lower tax rate which I believe is for earnings up to £40K, it will be those at the higher end of the scale that will benefit, not those reliant on state handouts to top up wages.

It should have been the employer that increased the low paid workers pay packets, not by stealing revenue from the state via a tax cuts which only the REAL middleclass from 2 high income families ever benefit from.

in reply to nigel: I was a single parent, in the 80s, when Margaret Thatcher et al launched a vicious attack on unmarried/single parents, UNTIL….her ministers’ knocked up their mistresses i.e. Cecil Parkinson & Tim Yeo, etc.
I was in a very violent marriage and HAD TO leave the relationship, a relationship that’s left me and my (now grown-up) kids very scarred.
My point is: forcing parents to stay in ‘toxic’ relationships has much broader ramifications e.g the result of my toxic marriage was: I had to have two-years psychiatric treatment, my son has bi-polar and my daughter has severe relationship problems. All these ramifications cost money and heartache, so as with everything IDS et al does he leaves devastation and cost with whatever he does.

Precisely. The idea that marriage, i.e., simply going through a ceremony, will make the children of a married couple better off than otherwise is nonsense. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and all that.

Bide your time for when the raving lunatic slaphead is eventually ousted from his cushy desk job. He is akin to a slippery eel when confronted with true facts and figures over his massive cock-up of the system. UJM is soon about to implode in his face, The Work programme could eventually be the next victim.

Reels and reels of flaff from the Department of Wankers and Pricks, praising Universal job mis-match. Soon to be scrapped I hope as it breaches the Data Protection Act (surely), The European Convention of Human Rights Act and everything else I can think of regarding rights of privacy and prevention of fraud, slavery and cheap work programmes.

Vacancy Taking Rules
5.6 All vacancies pass through a validation process, determined by the DWP vacancy taking rules and appropriate monitoring processes are in place to ensure that any vacancies that fail the validation process are not posted on Universal Jobmatch.

5.7 Companies will have to agree to the term and conditions of the service and will need to comply with equality legislation throughout the recruitment process.

5.8 Any jobs identified as not complying with the vacancy taking rules and terms and conditions will be notified to DWP, who will ensure only lawful vacancies are displayed and may take action to suspend/withdraw services from these companies if appropriate.

5.9 Jobseekers and companies will be able to report any issues via the ‘Contact Us’ facility within the service for the appropriate action to be taken.

** Load of cobblers as I complained to them about fake jobs and no action was ever taken.

Public services have become big business. G4S, Atos, Capita and Serco between them hold £4bn of public service contracts. Yet the veil of secrecy surrounding government outsourcing all too often prevents parliament and the public from holding these companies to account and scrutinising the work of the public officials who negotiate and manage contracts on our behalf. “Commercial confidentiality” is the usual excuse. Yet the greatest resistance to transparency seems to come not from the private sector but from the government itself.

G4S and Serco overcharged the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds on electronic tagging contracts, claiming money for ex-offenders who were in fact dead. This had been going on for eight years without the Ministry of Justice noticing.

The known cases of wrongdoing have all too often been exposed by whistleblowers, rather than officials charged with overseeing contracts. That was the case with the welfare-to-work programme, where the Department for Work and Pensions missed vital evidence of potential fraud and malpractice.

Companies that choose to enter this market should be held to high ethical standards. Falsifying data to mislead the state is simply not on. Bullying and silencing whistleblowers is likewise unacceptable. Those who profit from delivering public services must be held responsible for making sure that taxpayers’ money is used well.

Half of what goes on is not official failings it is blatant corruption, deliberately executed by civil servants who are willing to compromise themselves rather than loose their lucrative positions.
perhaps if any losses, once exposed, were taken from their salaries or pensions and paid back to the state, then you might not see so many deliberate mistakes.

yes mr smith is very ill probably narcasistic personality disorder and dillusionall i really think he needs to be put in a secure hospital like rampton,just to get the right help,im sure once he has had some treatment,meds ect councilling he will be a better man for it..bless him

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